YouSaid · the spoken record

Ernest Garcia

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68
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2025-04-07
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2025-04-07
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1
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  1. “See those people, you've got to make sure that you address it quickly. I think a very, very common archetype that leads, in my opinion, to like a ton of wasted effort.”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Think that there's like an archetype of a person that is extremely common. And I think that they're even more common in like Silicon Valley. And I think they have good raw material, but I think that they can be very destructive. And so I think that you either need to avoid them or identify them and work to resolve what is inside them that I think can be problematic. And I think these people are storytellers. They're people that they're usually very smart. They're usually very conceptual. They're usually very good at fitting frameworks together. They're usually very articulate and persuasive. They're usually very high energy and charismatic, but they lack the ability to get practical and to find the occasions where they're wrong and then to like own that and adjust. to shift the explanation or to shift to the next problem and to just like kind of keep bouncing to the next one but because they're charismatic and high energy and smart they always have people following them and i think that those people can be tough so i think when you”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I would way rather take a person in any role that is respected by someone that I respect than someone who's done it before. My personal view is like, I don't care that much if you've done it before. I really don't. And I don't care that much if you did it at a company that everyone thinks is a great company or if you have a degree that everyone thinks a great degree. If you're deeply respected by someone that I deeply respect, I just think you can figure it out. And so for me, that's like way more important than anything else.”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Because I'm not very good at that. So I've got seven and then I think try to have all of them have as many as they can. I would not consider myself a great manager. I consider myself much better at trying to solve problems and get involved than I am, I think, a natural manager.”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “The closer you get to the ground, the better you are. And I think that the pressure of scale pushes everyone up the pyramid. I think success pushes everyone up the pyramid. People do really well in their career and they want to go manage more people and they want to have one-on-ones and they want to influence a lot. But I think that if you want to make the biggest difference, get in the game, get on the ground where things are happening, sit there with the actual people that are doing work. Your one-on-ones are great. Like you should have real conversations with people. But if you're just there influencing what's happening right now, you're leading. People are learning from that. That's like the way it actually happens. And so I think fighting abstraction, especially for a conceptual person, is very important.”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think abstraction is very bad, at least for a person who starts conceptual. I think abstraction is very bad because you have this constant desire to abstract.”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Each other because they're not the same type of person. It's hard to pair those things, but if you can, I think it's very, very valuable.”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Operator, but then I think the ceiling of your possible success is a function of the conceptual thinker. And so to me, like marrying those things together, I think is really, really important and really hard. And I think the most productive people in the world are kind of both. I think through this journey, I've been lucky enough to meet Jeff Wilkie at one point and we went through one of our inspection centers together. And the number one takeaway I had from that is just he's one of these people that is both things. Like he's a very conceptual thinker. He's very analytical and he uses frameworks to evaluate everything. But then he also wanted to tell me that he thinks that the shapes in which we're parking cars are stupid because we're not able to move the cars around as quickly. That extreme detailed focus and then his storytelling of the ways that they face those problems at Amazon and just hearing how iterative it was was just interesting because you very rarely talk to someone who is as fluent in frameworks and concepts and also as obsessed with details. Pairing those things is really important and usually they repel.”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Like one of the things that I've come to believe is that pairing those two things is exceptionally important. I think that if you can pick one, I think you want operators. Like operators get things done and operators focus on the practical and they make sure that the wheels turn and they make sure that whatever problems people are facing every single day get resolved. And I think that you must have that to succeed. Oftentimes operator mentalities view more conceptual thinkers and kind of more strategic thinkers as sort of head in the cloud idealist. And it's hard for them to work well together. I think a lot of times these conceptual thinkers view operators as solving problems that are less important, right? It's not as interesting. Like I can't sit around a campfire and talk about this for three hours and impress my friends. And so I think a lot of times the two don't fit together as well as you would like. But I think that in reality like. the more important of the two for any success like getting from zero to one is”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The simplest answer, I believe, and I hope is yes. I think it's easy to see kind of software layers being easier to build over time. But I think a software layer sits on top of physical processes and then fits on top of business processes and then software kind of enables that. As it sits today, I think you want to have meaningful physical processes where things are moving. And ideally, different business processes where the dots are connected in different ways. And then the software layer makes all that happen because if the software is easy to replicate, the next two layers are still hard. So I think you want to have as many layers as you can.”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “The reality is people taking layered risk, like when you have to solve 10 problems in a row, there's just not that many people that want to take that risk. I think there's people that will take two or three risks in a row. But when you've got like 10 in a row, it's just, it's very hard to find that match of someone who wants to take that risk. And I think, you know, given what I feel like I've seen and observed and learned throughout this journey, to me, the most important input to that question to assess what the real risk is, is I think trying to understand the people, because I think that people are going to face problems and they're going to face the strain that comes from facing those problems. And they're going to react in some way and they're going to try to solve them. And if you have many things in a row that have to be solved, I just think it's impossible to foresee what all those things are. So you have to just decide you believe in the people to ultimately solve all the problems as they come.”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “When you're looking at what other people are doing and you see patterns that are emerging that are successful over and over again, it takes real conviction to choose to kind of run against that. And I think at the time that we were trying to do our early fundraises, capital intensity, operational intensity were not popular. Marketplaces were very popular. That was kind of like the pattern people saw. Phoenix was not viewed as a market where you could build a company. And so I think we didn't fit the patterns. And I think that we didn't have the relationships that gave investors the opportunity, I think, to have deep enough conviction in some other way that would allow them to overpower the fact that we weren't fitting those patterns. That would be my like PC answer today at the time when you're like pissed off and you can't get money and you're like, isn't the way this is supposed to work is that like venture capital is supposed to be risk takers? They're supposed to be the ones that fund risk in the economy.”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “In 2022, our stock went down 99%. Our bonds were trading at like 40 cents of the dollar. And I think to the world, that looked like a near-death experience. Honestly, from my perspective, I didn't ever think it was that. But I think it very clearly looked like that. And I think it was very public. And I think that kind of thing is rarely public. And so I think that's probably the one that would be in most people's minds. But I think in my mind, there were real near-death experiences early on where you're struggling to get things built. You don't have the whole machine and you're struggling to get capital. And at the end of the day, like as a company taking a big swing, you're not going to make money for a while. And so you need capital. That's the lifeblood of the business and of kind of having the option to even keep building. And I think we really struggled to kind of, you know, get that capital. So I think early on we had several times where we got very, very tight on capital that were tough. And so those to me were like the real near-death experiences that were, they were hard to manage through. What do you learn? I think you learn like how many stories have we all heard?”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “That are basically indirectly telling you they don't really think the way you're going to do is going to work. And you can kind of bend to that and you can choose to kind of shift in that direction and build like a software layer, or you can be stubborn and you can persist. And I think we chose the latter. And I think making that choice led to at least one extra near-death experience. But the truth is, I think most companies that take a big swing generally have multiple near-death experiences. And so I think avoiding one extra one to kind of sacrifice the things you deeply believe is not worth it. So we went ahead and just kept doing what we were doing.”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “many, many times. So even if I go back to six months into the business, we were out trying to raise money. We went on Silicon Valley. We talked to every fund that you could possibly imagine. And basically it was just like we were capital intensive, operationally intensive. We had like industrial components to our business and everyone wanted us to be software and everyone would just ask the question like, can't you just be a software layer on top of dealerships? And I do think that there's a very good chance we actually would have been successful raising money had we made that choice. But I think that we kind of believed that vertical integration was very important. Honestly, I think every bit as much so for control over the entirety of the customer experience as for the economic benefits and strategic benefits that come from being totally stacked and having access to all the economics. But that was just like a core belief that we had. We were like, we don't believe you can give customers the experience that we want to give them unless you do it all. And I think, you know, you face like a really tough choice there. You're like, okay, you have really smart people that are proven that have backed lots of companies that have done well before.”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Can we jump to the next question, please? Here's what I say. I think truth is oftentimes like you can find a positive order or a negative word to describe almost anything. And I think it comes down to like, you know, what are you trying to get across? Sometimes it's more impactful to communicate with the surprising choice. And so I think that there's a lot of good that comes out of being stubborn. I think there's a lot of good that comes out of self-belief, which could also be restated as being an egomaniac. But I do think that's what entrepreneurs are. I think it's really hard to sit in a room with a bunch of people who tell you you can't and to believe that you can if you're not stubborn and if you don't have maybe a touch too much self-belief so i think that is a characteristic of entrepreneurs in my opinion when”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Hours of collaboration and teamwork. It can be really difficult to build a team that's aligned on everything from values to workflow, but”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “The pressure of scale pushes everyone up the pyramid. I think that if you want to make the biggest difference, get in the game. You don't want to be a reaction to other people's reduced view of what you are. When you're public, it's just cold. It's ruthless. It's just results. No one's ever going to clap for you. What's more important to you is it important to succeed or is it important to have the best personal life that you can have? This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now stay we feature one of the most incredible stories from the public market.”

    2025-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source